Home > Encyclopedia of Medicine > Factitious Disorders

Definition

Factitious disorders are a group of mental disturbances in which patients intentionally act physically or mentally ill without obvious benefits. The name factitious comes from a Latin word that means artificial. These disorders are not malingering, which is defined as pretending illness when the "patient" has a clear motive, such as financial gain.

Description

Patients with factitious disorders produce or exaggerate the symptoms of a physical or mental illness by a variety of methods, including contaminating urine samples with blood, taking hallucinogens, injecting themselves with bacteria to produce infections, and other similar behaviors.

There are no reliable statistics on the frequency of factitious disorders, but they are more common in men than in women. The following conditions are sometimes classified as factitious...